Pamela Harriman Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman 1920-1997

20 September 2024

Pamela Harriman was a noble spirit devoted to friends, family and both her countries. Not many people could have journeyed so successfully and far She was grace personified, at home equally in Churchill’s air raid shelter or the Élysée Palace. President Chirac was saddened by her death: “To say that she was an exceptional representative of the U.S. does not do justice to her achievement. She lent to our longstanding alliance the radiant strength of her personality. She was elegance itself...a peerless diplomat.” That old Francophile, her father-in-law, would have smiled.

Read More Read More

Life Amid Chaos: “The Hope Still Lives…The Dream Shall Never Die”

23 March 2020

My brother Andrew Roberts inspired this post, when he asked for Churchill quotations about childbirth. Yes, even now, friends have brought a new life into the world. Three months ago, my son and daughter-in-law did likewise.

Life Goes On

On 30 May 1909, Clementine Churchill was pregnant with their first child, Diana. Winston, asking her to practice social distancing, wrote these beautiful words: “We are in the grip of circumstances, and out of pain joy will spring, and from passing weakness new strength will arise.”

Four and one-half decades later, his daughter Mary was a fortnight overdue for the birth of Charlotte, her fourth child.…

Read More Read More

Present at the Creation: Randolph Churchill and the Official Biography (2)

24 August 2019

“Randolph Churchill: Present at the Creation,” is taken from a lecture aboard the Regent Seven Seas Explorer on the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise around Britain, 8 June 2019. Continued from Part 1.

Randolph Churchill Postwar

Out of the Army and Parliament in 1945, and divorced from Pamela in 1946, Randolph Churchill led a “rampaging existence,” his sister Mary wrote. “He always had lances to break, and hares to start.” He was loyal and affectionate, but he “would pick an argument with a chair.”

In 1948 he married June Osborne and fathered his second child, Arabella.…

Read More Read More

Present at the Creation: Randolph Churchill and the Official Biography (1)

8 August 2019

“Randolph Churchill: Present at the Creation,” is taken from a lecture aboard the Regent Seven Seas Explorer on the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise around Britain, 8 June 2019.

Most everybody has an inkling of who Winston Churchill was. But how many know of his son Randolph? How many British schoolchildren do you think have heard of him? Do they know that Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, who some think was a real person? They should, Sir Arthur was a great writer. Like Randolph Churchill, who founded the longest biography ever written. In the words of Dean Acheson, he was “present at the creation.”…

Read More Read More

Winston S. Churchill 1940-2010

10 March 2010

You can read about Winston Churchill’s career elsewhere. I’d like rather to indulge in the remembrance of a friend.

We met through the post forty-two years ago, when he became the third honorary member of the Churchill Study Unit, after his grandmother and his father. The latter had only just sent a letter of encouragement to our little group of stamp collectors when he himself died. It was June, 1968. In sending condolences, I asked Winston to take his father’s place. He accepted, adding, “It is consoling to know so many share my loss.”…

Read More Read More